A well-known and effective method of making pharmaceutical products and other sterile thermoplastic products employs form, fill and seal machinery such as the machinery disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,597,793 to Weiler, U.S. Pat. No. 4,176,153 to Weiler et al., U.S. Pat. No. 4,178,976 to Weiler et al., U.S. Pat. No. 4,707,966 to Weiler et al., and the patents cited therein. The machinery can be adapted to form cards containing several thermoplastic containers or ampoules which are joined together by frangible webs extending along adjoining sides of the respective containers. One such card is disclosed in, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,503,885 to Anderson. The end user subsequently splits off individual ampoules from the card prior to use.
Although the shipment of ampoules in card form has proven satisfactory for a majority of the intended applications, a need has been identified which requires the ampoules to be made available individually rather than as a card such as, for example, where an protective inert gas envelope is desired for the ampoules, and the manual splitting of the ampoules would adversely affect such inert gas envelope for a card of ampoules.
The present invention is directed to an assembly which allows a card of ampoules to be split into individual ampoules or a lesser group of ampoules during the manufacturing operation rather than manually at the point of use.